Early days
Early Days
This is an account I found while going through my diary made in South Africa in 2000.
14th Oct 2000
This isn’t what I imagined. Here I am, brand-new penknife and my embarrassingly virgin safari boots, and I’ve just been shown to my tent. It’s vast, and has a flushing loo. My bed’s got pristine white sheets for god’s sake! Where’s the adventure? Where is the sound of distant hyenas heckling the main players at the theatre of death? At least let me open my beer with my penknife, for crying out loud! “Sundowners at 7.30,” Francis the Boy Scout look-alike from Jo’burg has just told me. Oh Christ.
Later…
My fellow guests at the camp are a French family, giddy with excitement at the prospect of what lies ahead. All I feel is disappointment, and a tad guilty as we are waited on hand and foot. On our way to the restaurant tent (escorted by a guide in case a stray turtle should cause us any problems of course) I couldn’t help but think wistfully of what might have been. A roaring campfire, lying down under a starry ceiling as we all keep one eye open for curious killers lured by the smell of cooking impala which we’d caught that day under the massive African sun. But no, that was a fantasy belonging to one who spent too long dreaming about it in the office, rather than researching the modern day reality. [My experience as a roving photographer was then very little, and my naivety substantial!]
15th Oct 2000
I groaned as coffee was bought to my tent by a camp steward in starched white clothing, as if we were aboard a cruise liner heading down the Nile in 1926. Swinging my legs out of bed, and knocking the complimentary slippers angrily aside with my feet, I padded to the sink to wash my face. Pulling on my boots (I optimistically knocked them on the floor hoping for a scorpion. No such luck), I made my way to the main campfire where the other guests were huddled in their fleeces, compact binoculars at the ready. I wore my khaki short-sleeved shirt that I’d rubbed in the dirt in a sad attempt to make rugged and my Olympus OM10 that my old man has passed on to me. I half listened to the safety talk. Safety? In Africa? Bah! These tourists know nothing! Leave Africa to the Africans and the photo-journalists!
And then, at last, we set off into the wild.
I was reassured by the gun that the guide had with him not because it meant we were safe, but because it hiinted that we might find ourselves in a dangerous situation. The landscape around our camp is eerily barren. A fire a month or so ago has devastated a large area of it, and only now are small white flowers and tufts of grass beginning to poke out from the charred soil. Nature never gives up. Red-billed hornbills dart from one charred tree stump to the next. “It’s ze bird from ze Lion King,” the French dad told me. This is just the kind of Disney-fied safari you’re after, you amateurs, I thought angrily. Give me the stench of a fresh kill and snakes in my sleeping bag. Give me undrinkable water and shitting in a hole. GIVE ME ADVENTURE! As scorched earth gave way to green shrubbery, the guide began to stop every few metres and beckon us be quiet. After twenty minutes or so he stopped dead. A few metres ahead of us was a baby rhino.
I know that one baby rhino with the mother nowhere in sight is not a good thing. And the guide reaching for his gun wasn’t a good thing either. And the sound of crashing branches and furious snorting and thumping ground was definitely not a good thing. A big grey juggernaut hurtled towards us. The French family all hid behind a young sapling. Half of me was thinking what idiots they were for hiding behind such a pathetic barrier in the face of an unstoppable charging monster, while the other half was thinking, “What the fuck should I do?” I ran. The rhino ran after me. A shot rang out, and then another and I darted off to the left. The rhino kept on going, its baby following close behind. They disappeared; the mother’s grunts and the sound of breaking branches soon vanished with them. Shaking with adrenaline, sweat pouring from every pore, I sat on the ground and laughed. I laughed hysterically while the guide screamed at me for not doing what I had been told to do and hide behind the nearest tree, no matter how feeble.
I’ve got what I came for, but writing this now in bed, I sure am going to appreciate the safety of those white linen sheets tonight! If only I’d had the presence of mind to take a photo…
